Historically, people interested in monitoring aspects of their health have had few options in terms of finding an integrated system that is easy to use, inexpensive, customizable, private and portable. A primary way that people currently monitor their health is by making a trip to a doctor, or hospital. Hospitals and other medical institutions are loaded with equipment that measures health condition data, and such data can be instantly processed in some cases, or otherwise interpreted on-site, to help determine health risks for people that use the equipment on-site. However, this option has always been relatively expensive because not only is the measuring equipment expensive, but other hospital overhead is expensive, not to mention the cost of a doctor's or nurse's time, and loss of one's own time, which all factor into the overall expense of receiving health related data on-site at medical institutions. Accordingly, going to a doctor to receive health related condition information can be an extremely costly measure, especially if all one wants to do is make a rudimentary determination that a certain known health condition is within a normal range, or in check, for instance.
In other places in the market, standalone exercise equipment is sometimes outfitted with health meter(s) whereby, for example, a user making physical contact with a hand grip of the equipment can observe near instantaneous feedback on display about his or her heart rate in relation to optimal exercise conditions for that user and equipment based on conditions such as age and weight of the user. Such standalone exercise equipment, however, is not inexpensive and clearly not portable. Moreover, the software it comes with is not customizable, and the display of such equipment is not particularly private in that any on-looker can take a look at a neighboring display. Finally, such data is not stored so that an individual's data can be examined over long periods of time. Still further, there is no way for these devices to automatically notify health officials in the event of a health emergency.
Other standalone health measurement devices might be portable, but nonetheless suffer other drawbacks. For example, some medical devices can be attached to a user's wrist, or otherwise to a user's body, so that a user can record health condition data while jogging. Some wrist watches include the ability to measure heart rate while a user wears the watch, for instance. However, such portable standalone medical devices suffer some similar drawbacks. For instance, the software is not customizable or updatable after the point of sale of the device. The data is not stored for historical viewing of the data, and is not reported to anywhere in the event of a health emergency. Similarly, home kits exist for measuring sugar levels by diabetics, and the like, however, none of these medical devices report the data in any meaningful sense to health professionals who may be able to help in the event of an unstable health condition.
Bluetooth technology has also been applied to some medical devices with the ability to communicate measured data via Bluetooth to other Bluetooth enabled devices. However, such devices thus far have been used in only limited scenarios.
In addition, today, if a user is aware of a health emergency, to receive immediate care, a user can call 9-1-1, though such a call may require consciousness, mobility and clear communication which may not be possible in the event of birth, or cardiac arrest. In addition, some products provide a proprietary closed loop emergency care system, whereby a person facing a serious health risk is given an “emergency button” available to the person. For instance, the emergency button can be kept on a person, or hung on a necklace, or the like, so that if the person experiences a health emergency, a simple press of the button notifies a centralized system. However, the emergency button system does not apprise the health professionals of the cause for emergency, or what health conditions directly preceded the emergency. In addition, such systems do not generalize to a variety of medical devices via standard interfaces.
Alternate techniques for directly measuring health condition data in a more immediate and relevant/accurate fashion are thus desirable. It would be further desirable to provide versatility, connectivity, and accuracy of health condition data via wireless mobile devices or similar portable devices. It would be further desirable to provide a service based on such reporting of health condition data to provide accurate real-time information and services to portable device users, based on their profile. It would be further advantageous to optionally provide the above-described benefits without requiring packet switch services (e.g., TCP/IP packet services) in order to enable the automatic collection and delivery of health data and services via a wireless data communications network. It would be still further desirable to improve upon control/voice interfaces and infrastructures for portable wireless devices to enable the delivery of periodic measurements from a client node within a network to a health station server, and to enable services to automatically initiate in response to results of the health condition data collected for a user or in response to pre-defined patterns found in the health condition data.